Posted by:
Lot's Wife
(
)
Date: March 31, 2020 08:36PM
This video too was produced by 3Blue1Brown, the man who did the previous one on exponential growth as a way of understanding the pandemic.
In this clip he runs several simulations of COVID-19's spread. Like all mathematical models, this one involves simplifications and hence is not exactly correct. But again like all good models, it does a great job of identifying the principles and variables that truly matter.
Particularly, he looks at what happens if you adjust things like personal hygiene, social distancing, bans on travel, and communicability. He thus identifies and prioritizes remedial policies and makes it possible for non-healthcare people to understand what is happening around us. In so doing, he also demonstrates the great importance of monitoring potential pandemic agents as soon as they enter the human species. Disease control is something that deserves a LOT of investment.
The bad news comes towards the end of the clip, where he highlights the criticality of testing early and aggressively to prevent a pandemic from gaining a foothold. That is an area where the United States, having in the last few years dramatically cut funding for infectious disease work, was far too slow and hence magnified the current problems tremendously. Also unsettling is the point he makes at about 21:00, where he shows that if you take all the remedial steps to contain the disease and then open things back up, the pandemic begins to accelerate in a second wave. What that suggests is that we are buying time and saving lives until a vaccine or something comparable is devised. COVID-19 is not something that is going away until then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxAaO2rsdIs&feature=youtu.beEdited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/31/2020 08:54PM by Lot's Wife.